Even if Moore's Law is "running out," there's still plenty of room at the bottom

Even if Moore’s Law is “running out,” there’s still plenty of room at the bottom

A very good piece by Tom Simonite in the MIT Technology Review looks at the implications of Intel’s announcement that it will slow the rate at which it increases the density of transistors in microprocessors. In one important way, this is an “end of Moore’s Law,” which predicted that the speed of microprocessors would steadily double every two years, making computation logarithmically cheaper for the foreseeable future. The timescales are getting longer, and may get longer still. Some pin their hopes on fundamental breakthroughs that restore the tempo of Moore’s Law, but even in the absence of such a breakthrough, there is still lots of new things that are both plausible and exciting and don’t require fundamental, unpredictable scientific discoveries. One such advancement is in fundamental computer science, specifically in…